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Recently I was asked, as happens periodically in this forum, to clarify my position on that thorniest of thorny questions: The Jewish Question. Specifically, @faceh asked me, after I had criticized his equating White Nationalism with statements about “gassing the Jews”, whether I would support the removal of all Jewish individuals from positions of power in White countries. Work stuff pulled me away for a few days and I’ve been unable to answer his question, but I think it’s a useful opportunity for a larger post.
I’ve spoken before about how my conception of Whiteness can be modeled as a series of concentric circles. The central circle - the cluster of the most archetypally and uncontroversially representative examples of Whiteness - consists, roughly, of the historic populations of what can broadly be called Northwestern Europe (the British Isles, Scandinavia minus Finland, the Low Countries, Northern France) plus the German-speaking peoples of Central Europe and the Tyrol, as well as the diaspora populations of these ethnic groups in the New World. Some ardent Nordicists would stop here and say that only people who fit into this first circle count as properly White, but this is a fringe position and not one to which I subscribe. My ancestry is 100% British Isles on all sides as far back as I can trace it, which is hundreds of years, so I don’t object to the Nordicist position out of any personal conflict of interest, but it seems to me that any conception of Whiteness that leads you to conclude that the Romans weren’t white is just a massive own-goal.
So, then we move on to the second circle, in which we find the populations of Spain, Portugal, most of Italy, Southern France, Finland, Hungary, and arguably the West Slavs and the Balts. All of these ethnicities have certain aspects that make them non-central examples of Whiteness - such as partial admixture from non-White substrates, like the Finns and the Iberians, or speaking a non-Indo-European language, in the case of the Hungarians and the Finns. Still, these are very White-looking people, relatively speaking, and their cultures have all played an important part in European history.
Past that, you get to a third circle, encompassing the South and East Slavs, the Romanians/Moldovars, the Maltese, the Sicilians, and the modern Greeks. The boundaries of this circle are blurry, and there are certainly aspects of these cultures which strike members of the central circle as quite distinctly foreign, which is part of why nativists and White Nationalists of the early 20th century vociferously resisted the mass immigration of these peoples into Anglosphere countries. Many of these ethnic groups contain very significant recent genetic admixture from non-European conqueror groups. An argument can be made (and sometimes is made) to exclude this circle from discussions of Whiteness. For me personally, though, any model of Whiteness that kicks out Tchaikovsky and Nikola Tesla is, again, an avoidable own-goal. The outer edges of this circle is where pretty much any commonly-used understanding of Whiteness would stop, though. There’s one glaring exception, though, and that is Ashkenazi Jews.
If you ask the average American if Jews are White, he’ll probably say yes, although it’s likely he hasn’t really thought much about it. If you show him a picture of, say, the Beastie Boys, he’ll readily and without hesitation identify it as a trio of White guys - he might not even be aware that they’re Jewish; still, if he reflects a bit on Jewish history and the fraught relationship between Jews and gentile Whites, he might concede that the question is complicated. And indeed it is! On the Dissident/White Identitarian Right, the question of whether or not Jews are White is generally considered to have been definitively answered - in the negative - and has been for some years now. However, there are some of us in that sphere who aren’t totally comfortable with nor confident about that answer.
I’ve spoken before about my warm feelings toward Jewish culture and Jewish people. The first girl I ever loved was (and still is!) Jewish, and my most recent long-term relationship was with a Jewish woman. The Jewish approach to comedy forms a foundational piece of my sense of humor: clever, heavily verbally-oriented, sarcastic, self-deprecating, at times neurotic, and suffused with a general sense of unease and alienation. From an early age, I strongly related to the Jewish intellectual tradition: contrarian, relentlessly critical and deconstructive, never taking anything at face value or uncritically accepting a proposition. It’s a culture that venerates intelligence, high verbal IQ, and the ability and willingness to argue. I strongly considered converting to Judaism for years, because I suspected that I would feel at home in that tradition. (And could land a beautiful Jewish woman - I have a type, and the Ashkenazi female phenotype epitomizes it.)
So, when I started getting deeper into the Dissident Right sphere, I found the discussion of the “JQ” to be by far the most difficult part to digest. While there is still a healthy Jew-welcoming (or, at least, Jew-neutral) faction of the White Right (Jared Taylor of American Renaissance has never publicly recanted his statement about Jews - “They look White to me!” and Paul Gottfried and Nathan Cofnas are still important rightist voices), the overwhelming stance of the hard Right is that the JQ has not only been answered in the negative, but is one of the most important questions - if not the single most important question - that one must answer when considering geopolitics today. I tend to keep my head down when the Jew stuff comes up in those spaces, simply because I know I’ll be shouted down and potentially singled out for suspicion as a subversive/infiltrator. But, the doubts and reservations I feel internally have not been resolved to my satisfaction.
Basically, I place Ashkenazi Jews in a nebulous fourth Circle of Whiteness. This peripheral circle’s boundaries are in flux, and ethnic groups in this circle can drop out or drift into this circle based on political and material developments within their own cultures. Groups that orbit in this circle also include the Japanese, the South Koreans, Latin American mestizos, Persians, Ottoman Turks, Indian Brahmins, and Arabs. The history of relations between these groups and the more central circles of Whiteness is incredibly fraught, and filled with periods of violence and persecution, conquest, inter-ethnic competition, and mistrust. Arabs and Turks were the great racial/religious enemy of Europeans for centuries, with enormous bloodshed and iterated conquests on both sides; on the flip side, they were on the forefront of scientific/cultural advances during a time of severe cultural regression and stagnation in Europe, and Arab/Turkish scholars were primarily responsible for preserving the works of the great Greco-Roman thinkers during that same time when White Europeans were busy abdicating their responsibilities as stewards of that tradition. Jews in medieval Europe were heavily represented in a parasitic rentier class, which contributed greatly to the animosity so many Europeans felt toward them; however, they were also massively overrepresented in vitally-important technical fields such as medicine. Something like two-thirds of doctors in medical Germany were Jews, meaning that countless gentile White lives were saved or immeasurably improved by Jews.
The great question, to my mind, when it comes to this fourth circle is: will these groups ever see themselves as White? Obviously these groups are always going to be peripheral to Whiteness; nobody is ever going to see a Japanese person as just as white as a Dutchman. However, with the looming population explosion in sub-Saharan Africa and the Global South more generally, we could be approaching a situation in which it will become necessary for the civilizations of the Global North to begin mounting a coordinated defense against the waves of migration that could soon begin spilling out of the Global South. In the same way that Christian Europeans had to bury their long-standing inter-ethnic enmities in order to present a unified front against Saracen and Turk invaders, it may be necessary for societies above a certain level of material and cultural development to bury the hatchet and form a phalanx against the marauding hordes spilling across the Sahara and the Darien Gap. If such a scenario arises, civilizations such as China, India and Iran may have to make the crucial choice about whether or not they want to stand with Europeans, in a united Eurasian front - a Fortress Eurasia, if you will - to repel the invaders, or whether to actively join or facilitate the invaders as they overwhelm and annihilate the already weakened and degenerated peoples of Europe and the Anglosphere.
If such a scenario arises, I want these civilizations on my side. (“I never thought I would die side-by-side with an Arab.” “What about a friend?”) Under such conditions, a criterion of “White enough” will necessarily be sufficient. Jews are well within the “White enough” category, as far as I’m concerned, and I wish that others on the White Right would not be so cavalier about continuing to ignite the already-burning bridge with an ethnic group that still has the capacity to become a powerful ally, but which also had the possibility to continue its development into an equally powerful and implacable enemy.
So, the Jewish Question is actually a series of questions, and some of those questions need to be answered by Jews themselves. I don’t know how many Jews, or what percentage of Jews, see themselves as my enemy, or are likely to act as my enemies as worldwide racial conflict begins to boil over. I’m open to believing that the answer isn’t as dire as many on my side believe. I don’t know the answer, and I’m still trying to talk it out.
I'm not sure exactly which reply in this chain sparked this thought, so I'm putting it here.
There's a thing I notice myself doing, where I sort of expand my sense of identity in a solidarity with Republicans, because they are the enemies of my enemies. By a decade of common ground in the culture wars and politics, I have come to kind of think of them as my ingroup. I cheer the successes. I lament and fear their failures. But that identification can easily fall apart when stressed in the right place. Bring up abortion, or Iraq, or the drug war, and suddenly I remember Actually, I'm A Libertarian. I've never been a member of the Republican party. I've voted for roughly equal numbers of Republicans and Democrats for significant offices, and more third party than either. To the extent that "Republican" is an identity, it is one I can detach like a lizard tail, when I need to do so to protect my ego.
When I see right-wingers complain about Jews, the usual context is pointing out that an ostensibly white writer talking about how America, or white people, or western civilization is terrible is actually Jewish.
As a demonstration and calibration, I quickly looked up I can Tolerate Anything But the Outgroup. There's a section where Scott quickly lists 10 different articles purportedly showing intense, loathing criticisms of white people coming from white people. Two of the links seem dead, and 2-3 seem almost certainly gentile, but in less than 10 minutes of lazily Googling people who mostly don't have Wiki articles, I was able to find that Rebecca Schoenkopf and Jacob Weisberg are Jewish. Amusingly, Jacob is the only one with a Wikipedia article, and it doesn't have an early life section. It does mention his parents, and his mother is apparently a famous Jewish socialite from Chicago. So, minimum 25% Jewish rate.
I think a lot of what they're seeing is a phenomenon of Jewish people getting caught up in utopian purity spirals like wokeness, but having that ego-saving escape hatch allows them to go all-in harder. They're basically Motte-and-Bailey-ing their own identity, getting the kudos for vicious, scathing self-criticism while not actually taking any of that criticism to heart because it doesn't really apply to them.
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